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GameSpy's Top 50 Arcade Games of All-Time

"Elf needs food, badly!" Ah, the magic of arcades. Featuring four-player co-op hack-and-slash action, classic fantasy characters, and a melange of monsters, Gauntlet immediately attracted 20-sided dice-throwers and those who would never be caught dead playing Dungeons & Dragons. Throw in a massive assortment of randomly selected mazes, non-linear gameplay, and a baritone narrator full of classic gaming one-liners, and you've got the blueprint for an all-time great arcade cabinet.

The complete lack of a storyline, enemy bosses, or a clear goal (besides killing monsters and finding exits) somehow didn't detract from Gauntlet's allure. That's because Atari deftly injected immediacy into its dungeon crawler: As your health ticked down with every second, and black-robed Death clawed at your back, Gauntlet was all about pure survival. And with three friends battling by your side -- sharing food, luring monsters into kill zones, and finding exits -- survival was all the reason you needed.

Atari's Star Wars hit arcades the same summer as the third movie, yet the events covered in the Death Star dogfight were 100% Ewok-free. The vector graphics that had mathematically (magically?) drawn monochrome classics Battlezone and Asteroids were put more colorful use in Atari's mind-blowing first-person rail shooter, and it was truly worthy of its source material.

The game pitted you against TIE fighters in space, before a low pass over the Death Star's surface -- and then you and an eagerly chirping R2-D2 (one of several voices captured with state-of-the-art tech) flew into the trenches where catwalks and cannons distracted you from your womp-rat-sized bull's-eye at the end of the line. If you managed to nail the infamously ill-conceived exhaust port without firing a shot, you were awarded a bonus for using the Force. It didn't take a Jedi mind trick to get you to pump more quarters into the cockpit version of this game. With the game's massive screen and stereo speakers pumping in actual audio clips from the films, gamers in 1983 were no doubt convinced that no game would ever come close to capturing the magic of Star Wars quite like this one -- and they were right!